


Rapunzel

by thecarlysutra



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-11
Updated: 2010-03-11
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/pseuds/thecarlysutra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.  Set between "Lover's Walk" and "The Wish."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rapunzel

  
Thorns tangle in her hair.

The brambles are so large, so sharp, that Buffy cannot tell which cuts are from the thorns, and which are from the demons she flees. The fire of opening flesh burns around her, and the whistling of the brambles whipping past her ears as she runs drowns out any predator noise. She may as well be blind and deaf, and this impotence, this loss of sensation, bothers her more than anything.

Thorns, thorns, fangs. Angel's fangs biting into her lip. He doesn't mean to hurt her, but sometimes he can't help himself.

The guilt and fear settle onto her like a heavy cloak. _I can't love you, because you're dead. I killed you and mourned you, and if I can't stop loving you, I'll have to do it again._

It took all of her strength—more strength than she even knew she had—to do it the first time. There isn't strength enough to do it again. She tries to force his kisses to taste like ashes in her mouth, but the stain of his perfect touch, his bottomless love, are too true to be perverted by her wishful thinking. She wears them like scars borne into her flesh.

***

Cordelia dresses in front of the mirror. Le Perla bra and panties, black silk, her hair hanging in dark, damp curls around her face. The hollows of her eyes and cheeks are pronounced; she worries that she's lost weight. There's a line between fashionably thin and unpleasantly skeletal, and like all lines, Cordelia's aim is to skip the balancing act and just be on the right side.

The familiar line of her torso is broken by the ugly wound below her ribs. It still radiates pain throughout her body if she so much as thinks about it, but she's more upset about the scar. Pain is transient, but she'll never be able to wear a bikini again without thinking about it. Her body, her oldest and most trusted weapon, has been irrevocably altered without her consent, and this infuriates her. And the wound is still open, weeping, and requires bandages: it ruins the line of all her outfits.

***

Cordelia finds sleep elusive. She watches the shadows of streetlights flitter across her bedroom ceiling, and she languishes under the pain of the vice around her heart. If Xander and his little friends thought she was the queen of mean before, they haven't seen anything yet.

His love will only make her heart smaller.

***

Buffy's lungs burn, and the strength is bleeding from her muscles. She is limp with exhaustion, and her legs only keep pumping because the alternative is surrendering to the sharp claws of certain death, and she's been there, done that.

The weight of her dress, heavy with the water that snuffed her last breath. Her carefully sculpted coiffure loose, tendrils snaking around her face, the back of her neck. God, her neck, alive with pain. Her heels slipping slightly with each step.

Angel's weak flesh, shuddering beneath her hand. He still has that death smell, curled up cozy in his flesh. Bone deep. Buffy's stomach turns, knowing she's hurting him, but one of them has to be strong and he's just come back from hell, so it has to be her. Her sound hands hold firm, stretching the bandages taut.

***

Cordelia sees the change in the shadows before she hears the window begin to squeak open. She sits up in bed, pulling her blankets around her, and beholds the skeletal silhouette framed starkly against her window, backlit by the ghostly glow of the streetlights outside. Fear pulses through her, imagining the thing breaking into her home to devour her. She is too young and beautiful for so undignified a death, but then, monsters always want a beautiful maiden for their sacrifice.

The thing opens her window, letting in a cool gust of night wind, night smells. Jasmine, dew, graveyard. And then the thing turns to close the window, and the moonlight washes over it, and now Cordelia isn't afraid, only annoyed.

"Gee," she says, "I wish vampire _slayers_ had to be invited into your home."

Buffy turns from the window, takes a step toward her. She is filthy, dirt and blood streaking her face, her arms, her clothing. There are leaves and thorns tangled in her hair, and her eyes are distant, dazed—mourner's eyes. She looks like such hell that Cordelia actually feels bad for pointing out how unwelcome she is.

"Sorry," Buffy says. "This was the first place I knew. I can't run anymore."

Cordelia rises, her blankets falling away. The night air bites at her as she approaches the window, looks out into the night.

"Are there, like, demons out there?" Cordelia says. "Did you bring them with you?"

"I think I lost them." Buffy joins her at the window. "I don't see anything . . ."

Cordelia sighs. "Just great. You know, I had a perfectly nice life before you moved here. And now there's almost always someone trying to kill me."

Buffy is still looking out the window, her eyes fixed.

"I know the feeling," she says. "One day I'm this normal, happy, popular cheerleader, and the next day I'm expelled, and my parents hate me, and I spend all my time with dead people." She climbs upon the sill. "I'll go."

Cordelia's manicured fingers encircle Buffy's wrist, anchoring her to the safety of Cordelia's perfectly nice bedroom.

"Don't be so dramatic," she says. "You can stay here, at least until you're sure you won't be killed upon leaving."

Buffy allows Cordelia to pull her from the windowsill, back down to earth.

***

Cordelia sits Buffy on the bed, and then disappears into her bathroom.

"I don't need you getting blood all over my Egyptian cotton sheets," she says, returning with cotton balls, hydrogen peroxide, and a hairbrush.

Cordelia kneels beside Buffy on the bed, wets a cotton ball with hydrogen peroxide, and presses it to Buffy's face. It reminds Cordelia of a makeover—which Buffy sorely needs, but now probably isn't the time—the other girl just sitting still, letting Cordelia work her magic.

Cordelia's clever fingers slip through Buffy's hair, removing the thorns. Buffy closes her eyes as Cordelia runs the hairbrush through Buffy's tangles, leans back to Cordelia's hand on her neck, steadying her.

"Hold still," Cordelia says, but her fingernails tickle as they graze the sensitive flesh of Buffy's throat, so it's hard.

It's all Buffy can do not to laugh.

***

The doctors tell her what to do, where to go, how and when to eat. She is tethered to her bed by the machines, the IV; she is tethered to her bed by pain. Cordelia is not a sheep, but she is penned like one, like veal, cornered to remain soft and pretty. She dreams of tearing the monitors, the IV, from her flesh and running, running barefoot through the halls of the hospital until she tastes freedom, until her muscles burn.

But she worries about scars, and besides, once she leaves she really has nowhere to go. She'll still be in Sunnydale, check mated into her new position as fallen queen, a girl not even good enough to keep Xander Harris's attention. She has no moves left.

***

It was easier when he was dead, and there was no option of having him; it's so hard not to fall back into step, to rejoin the dance, when he's here and under her hands, when he cries her name in his sleep.

But one of them has to be strong and he's just come back from hell, so it has to be her.

***

Buffy is clean and scrubbed, the blood and dirt erased from her flesh, her hair.

"You need to get out of those clothes," Cordelia says, "you're going to get graveyard gunk—"

"—all over your Egyptian cotton sheets," Buffy says. Then: "Okay."

Buffy kicks off her shoes, and then she stands, and she unthreads buttons, and she unzips zippers. And Cordelia is pushing the dirt-stiff, blood-stiff fabric off her skin, leaving her just clean and scrubbed, and Buffy lets her.  



End file.
